Right, well there's two things to be said, here.
Bluecast wrote:Reading some forums some people seem to hate their 360/PS3 because it's stuck on 720P. Now being totally new to having HD the top I have seen on my TV is 1080i from Programming. However it was compressed due to being a basic cable. PS3 to me looks great in 720P but again not seen full 1080P yet on this TV. Wii U is native at 1080P and sure all next gen systems will be.
If that's true, your television is not a 1080p set, only a 1080i set. Huge difference. 1080
p refers to 'progressive-scan', whereby the entire screen is refreshed all at one. No alternating lines, no strobing, combing or flickering. Just a whole new image every frame. 1080
i refers to 'interlaced', whereby
half of the image is refreshed every frame in alternating lines. So, row 1, row 3, row 5, etc etc. Then on the next frame, the rows of pixels that were not updated in the last frame have their turn.
Interaced video was developed in order to save bandwidth when television was an emergent-technology. This produces the famous 'combing' effect. Now, there are various 'de-interlacing' algorithms about (your set almost certainly has one, Ryudo), but in this day and age they're meant simply to clean up broadcast television, the vast majority of which is broadcasted as interlaced video, and also serve to make some older interlaced DVDs prettier.
You'd be better off setting your TV to 720p, Ryudo. 1080i
sounds higher, but really you're only getting half that in every frame. At least with 720p you're getting a pure image, without having to worry about extra processing being done to deinterlace the image, robbing you of valuable response time.
Combing;
As a matter of technicality, LCD and OLED screens are incapable of displaying true interlaced video.
All such televisions convert the image to progressive scan in order to display it. The question is one of processing, and if so, the quality of that processing. No deinterlacing or bad deinterlacing means that you'll still see the combing, it'll just be sent to your eyes as two interlaced, combed frames being sent as one.
Of course, regardless of the quality of processing, there is always artifacting from deinterlacing. Another reasons why 720p would be the better choice for you, Ryudo.
Bluecast wrote:Question is does it bug you that consoles are still 720P?
Nope, and I own a proper 1080p set. There's something
crucial here that you must understand in order to make sense of any of this. There's 'native rendering resolution', and 'final scaled resolution'. Now, both 360 and PS3 can upscale any resolution to 1080p. This is why there's always a "Supports 1080p" on the back of every game box. It doesn't mean the games
are 1080p, it means that they can scale to that resolution.
For a ballpark figure, most retail/disc games for PS3/360 render natively at or around 720p. In the early days, the PS3 version of the same game would sometimes incur a drop in native resolution (GTA IV on 360 - 720p, on PS3- 640p). This is less the case, now. The point here is that retail games for those consoles almost never render natively at 1080p. I can think of one occasion where a disc game did - Virtua Fighter 5.
Call of Duty is an excellent example. Ever since COD4, it has rendered natively at 600p. Probably the lowest this gen has ever provided in a retail game (and a big reason why it runs at 60fps). So you're playing your 600p game on your console set to 1080p, on your 1080p television. The game leaves the rendering phase producing a 600p image, the console than upscales this image to 1080p. Your television displays it, being none-the-wiser.
Now, it's not quite
that simple. The 360 has a dedicated scaling component, whereas the PS3 does not. Some people prefer to set their PS3s to 720p, believing that their television does a better job of scaling. Which they will do, by the way. Your TV scales
everything that does not fit it's resolution.
It's still good to have a 1080p set, though. Blu-rays are native to this resolution, and look amazing. Also, while true 1080p 360/PS3 retail games are thin on the ground, the same cannot be said of XBLA/PSN games. Many of the simpler ones or 2D ones are the full-fat 1080p. Even some polygonal ones. WipeOut HD is one of the top of my head. Oh, Tekken 5 Online Edition is 1080p native, as well. Perfect Dark XBLA, the Banjo-Kazooie games from XBLA. The list goes on.
In short, no I'm not bothered that the majority of my games aren't using my television to it's full potential. Why? Because a nicely upscaled 600p still looks
way better than a blurry 480i, if you ask me. A large chunk of my PS3/360 stuff (when taking the downloadable games into account) does in fact render natively at 1080p, and so I'm glad to have a nice set which supports that. Which is to say nothing of Blu-rays. Blade Runner on Blu-ray in 1080p looks so gorgeous.